Is Berkeley Ready to Pay for Sex-Change Operations?

I'm hoping the next Heaven's Gate will be even better than the last one.

I think it is a psychological issue.

That makes no sense. If GDI is a mental disorder then the treatment (transition) does not work, ever. That's like saying that a successful treatment for paranoia is stalking the patient.

Ally McBeal agrees!

It 'works' in the sense that the person's body becomes more congruent with the mind (the opposite, as we've already discussed, does not work) and the person can get on with a happier, more productive, less stressed-out life just like when a person recovers from disease or finds a depression treatment that restores them to normalcy or gets a birth defect corrected.

I don't think I understand your point. Complete transition works, essentially, ALL the time (the failure rate is less than for any of hundreds of medically approved treatments - for instance, some people get a bypass yet remain obese) - partial transitions are successful at least partially.

The only way you can make your last sentence make sense if if you take the position that a surgically feminized body is not in fact a female body even if it is indistinguishable without clinical tests.

That opinion is only relevant to the success of the treatment if you are the patient. if SHE feels her body is correct, then it is.

I think they should address what I consider to be the compelling issue of economic identity disorder -- specifically in my case.

I think I should be living in a mansion in Beverly Hills.

I was born to do just that -- but it hasn't happened.

It doesn't.

And?

It is not the job of government to pay for these operations.

If they want their employees to have access to these operations then they need to find insurance carriers who will pay for such operations.

Wasn't there some group trying to do just that back in the 70s ...?

After working in retail and having to practically shove employees in the womens bathroom to clean them I'd say...yeah they need their own bathroom.

I've seen women bathrooms that look like a horror movie. Killing fields. Genocide chambers......



I think I have PTSD over it......

I've cleaned public bathrooms before, too. People in general are nasty, women just have more ways to be nasty with their bathroom habits.

I've cleaned public bathrooms, too. and I've never seen any difference as far as nastiness is concerned, between the women's room and the men's room

Then you were fortunate. I've had the pleasure of cleaning bathrooms at a general/dime store called the Variety Center when I was 15, then later in a McDonald's, a Hardees, and two convenience stores. I have picked up used feminine hygiene products off of the floor, and scrubbed blood off of toilet seats more times than I care to remember.

That's disgusting.

Can't say I've ever seen that in a women's restroom, let alone when I've worked jobs that I've had to clean them.

also, I haven't worked at a fast food restaurant on a friday or saturday night in more than 20 years and I've never worked in a bar, let alone on one of those nights.

I've seen blood on the walls. Literally.

Looking at public bathrooms makes you wonder just how these people live at home.

Goodness. When I was in High School working at a grocery store, I sometimes had to clean the restrooms.

The Women... their room stank.

om another forum there was a rather lng discussion of "hovering"

Apparently a lot of women are so paranoid about catching some cootie or other from a toilet seat that they hover a couple of inches above the seat.

Thus, of course, often causing the very nastiness they seek to avoid.

^^ That's the reason I never use public restrooms in bars.

related to my early reaction to this story - that Berkley should simply obtain insurance that covered these procedures:

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/news/arti...transgender-surgery-1023524.php#ixzz1EffVTN3Y


so ultimately Berkley's problem, as always, is trying to do on the government dime what can be done via private sector alternatives.

So here's something Skin's been pondering about this subject for about 20 seconds: Why aren't people getting surgical reassignment to entirely new genders like you would modify a car? Like dual wide-gauge sport urethrae 'n' shit? You could have the Mens' room, the Ladies room, the MOPAR room, the NASCAR room... just wonderin'.

Hmmm, once I would have thought this was rididiculous. But, the research is showing that there really ARE some people whose genitalia does not match their hormones and brain. People like the track runner in Africa who was raised as a woman, and has female looking genitalia (actually turned out to be a small penis not a large clit, and recessed testicles instead of fallopian tubes with eggs) she was basically 51/49 on the male female continuum. So these days, I don't think transgender ops are neccessarily elective surgery.
The difficulty with trans is this is the first time in history we have the technical ability to change these peoples situation. There have always been gender ambiguous humans. There are lots of examples of this throughout histroy. Some cultures even saw it as a symbol of balance.
So given our culture which doesn't revere balance or accept the ambiguity, combined with our new technical ability to make the change happen what is the right thing to do?
I wouldn't liken trans to just a "likely to commit suicide" problem it's more like some of the genetic problems that we can now fix in some way but can still be elective. Def culture comes to mind. There are people who are born Def and don't see anything wrong with them. They have their own language, etc. They don't need to change. But there is developing medical technology available to change that. Should insurance cover that? Or say "Well you have a way to communicate, just deal." or should it be a choice.
Interesting questions.
One of the places that technology and research have shown that things really aren't as black and white as people would think.

It's actually a lot more complex than even what you have described there.

There are several - at least half a dozen that I'm aware of - ways to be physically intersexed (that's what they call it) including some that don't manifest until puberty or later.

Beyond intersex conditions, there's a growing body of research which supports our contention that we are not just people who "prefer" the other gender role but that we actually are "hard-wired" in our brains for a gender opposite to the one found "from the neck down"

I could give you some links sometime to some of the papers If you want.

The basic non-technical overview is that there are at least two events in the womb in which hormones modify the fetus in terms of gender. All of us start out "female" are there are "hormone baths" which masculineize the fetus which will be born male - but there's one that affects the brain and one that affects the organs - if you get the latter and not the former, or vice-versa, for whatever reason - then there will be an incongruity between the two.

Further evidence (albeit circumstantial) can be found in the fact that little children recognize this incongruity in themselves long before they are sexualized in any way. It doesn't matter if the parents accept the child's claims or reject them, they persist. There no real way to account for a 3 or 4 year old boy with a persistent conviction that he's a girl (assuming no abuse and so forth) than that he was born that way.

Part of the difficulty in terms of a laymen's perception of this condition has to do with the phenomena of the cross-dresser.

A cross dresser engages in an ACTIVITY - like, for instance, a Civil War re-enactor, or hell, a golfer. He has NO interest in modifying his physical form and assuming the life of a female full time. he's just having some fun, for sexual gratification or not.

People in the transgender community are paranoid about being exclusionary because we are, after all, highly excluded by mainstream society. Very few are willing to say to anyone "you are not one of us" no matter the claim. but coming to the party late and without all the LGBT-correctness in mind - they aren't.

A cross dresser is playing, for fun. He's perfectly free to do it and i don't judge him - but he doesn't have a need to achive some peace of soul - some sanity. his needs are not my needs and his issues are not my issues and vice versa.

and yet,every "transgender" conversation is skewed because he is included in the conversation. if all that was going on, when someone debated who used what bathrooms (for instance) was dressing for fun, I'd agree 100% that there should be no allowance for the crossdresser because he doesn't HAVE to dress up and even when he does he's not disturbed by standing over a urinal. Same with work. If you have a bank or something and your crossdresser teller thinks it would be a lot of fun to come to work in drag - fuck him. That's like saying it would be more comfortable to show up in shorts and flip-flops.

But for the actual transsexual, this isn''t fun and games. And if i had my way crossdressers would be cut completely out of the conversation.

/rant.

Like this guy?

GENIUS! I'm going to have a second penis put in, so I can DP chicks without having someone else's balls slapping up against mine.

I haven't done it yet because I've got a couple things to work out. It sort've seems a shame to have a smaller one put on--it seems like a size upgrade is the natural thing--but for anal that may be the way to go.

Then I've got to decide on how to get it installed. I'm pretty sure I'll go with an over-under instead of a double barrel. But I don't know which one I want on top. I think I'd like the bigger one on top, but then you're pretty much out of luck for doggy style (because the big cock would be going in her ass) unless you hook up with a real freakasaurus.

Kinda, yeah. Does he go to the tomcats' room? Where, instead of urinals and toilets, they have carpet 'n' boxes of litter?